Written and Directed by Zach Cregger | 128 min | ▲▲▲1/2 | Crave

It’s easy to see why some in the audience might think the new horror/drama by Zach Cregger (Barbarian), about a group of vanished children, is a school-shooting analogy, but there’s more going on here than that. In fact, there might be too much to really nail what it’s about, a mix of thematic complexity and confusion.

For instance, Weapons spends part of its running time helping us empathize with a young woman at its centre who’s being unfairly vilified by her neighbours  — while also being honest about her shortcomings — but eventually swings around to find another woman to be the actual villain. Is Cregger using his film to illustrate the bedrock of misogyny buried deep in the suburban milieu, or is he just another male filmmaker afraid of the ladies?

I’ll take my shot at what I think it’s about: This is a mystery with notes of horror swimming in American suburban angst, where hating women is just one of many veins of homegrown nightmare. It channels parents’ fears about losing touch with their children and fear of the rage-fuelled mob while wearing its influences on its sleeves — most prominently Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, and any number of Stephen King adaptations — but still manages to feel fresh thanks to a non-linear structure, dynamite sound editing and visuals.

We’re in a leafy, middle-class suburb of an unnamed town served by your average elementary school. All but one of the kids from a single class, taught by a new teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), vanish one night at 2:17am, running out into the dark in their jammies — and it’s eerie as hell. No one can find them. Parents figure Ms Gandy is somehow involved, and what about that one kid who did show up for class the next morning? Why was he spared this disappearance?

We spend the first half hour with the put-upon teacher who self-medicates with alcohol and hooks up with a cop in town, Paul (a mustachioed Alden Ehrenreich). Then we get the perspective of one of the parents, Archer (Josh Brolin), Paul, a local drug addict on the streets (Austin Abrams), and the school’s principal (Benedict Wong) — the Rashomon effect of overlapping POV shaking up what might otherwise be a fairly straightforward chronological storyline.

Cregger’s sense of pace isn’t entirely to the benefit of suspense-building — early on as he’s framing this town and its unfortunate circumstances you might think even the filmmakers don’t know what happened to those kids. There’s little indication of an advancing dread or narrative seeds sewn. Aside from a couple of vivid dreams — one including a phantom semi-automatic assault rifle hanging in the sky — this is a patchwork of unhappy people’s lives intersecting, some of which goes a bit slack in places where it should be taut.

But as we ping-pong around town,  all the relevant information is revealed with the arrival of a character played by veteran performer, Amy Madigan (Field Of Dreams, Gone Baby Gone), sealing a particular supernatural undercurrent and setting up a fantastically gory finale.

Cregger allows more than a little humour to creep into his movie. As he stages a host of deeply disturbing imagery, he also recognizes its absurdity set against the mundane scenes of suburban life. This is a genuine step up from Barbarians, where the third act tripped into the ridiculous but without the (intentional) chuckles. Love to see that kind of progress.